


Of Back Alleys and Illegal Tyranny

by moontyrant



Category: Daredevil (TV)
Genre: 5 Times, Alternate Universe - Post-Canon, Canon Disabled Character, Fluff, Handcuffs, Hurt/Comfort, Identity Reveal, M/M, Mild Smut, My First Smut, Plot, Secret Identity, Tooth-Rotting Fluff, With A Twist, Wordcount: 5.000-10.000
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-25
Updated: 2015-11-25
Packaged: 2018-05-03 07:24:12
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,652
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5281958
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/moontyrant/pseuds/moontyrant
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>or 5 times Hell's Kitchen's new Kingpin made Daredevil's life difficult.</p><p>The first time Matt and Foggy kissed, they were piss drunk after a hellacious round of midterms, sitting on Matt’s bed, the radio playing softly in the corner, people down the hall being annoying and loud, Foggy’s face cradled between Matt’s palms and Foggy’s fingers in Matt’s hair.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Of Back Alleys and Illegal Tyranny

The first time it happened, Matt, or more accurately, Daredevil, was pissed. With Fisk out of the way, half a dozen criminals with delusions of grandeur swept into Hell’s Kitchen to take his place. The streets were a cacophony of nervous drug peddlers, gun dealers and human traffickers all wondering who their new master would be. And Daredevil moved to the fore, tackling the head of the Guatemalan mafia, usurping New York City’s meanest arms dealer, knocking an up and coming cult leader off his pedestal. And it would never be enough; however many beatings Daredevil took, however many criminals he landed in jail, a dozen more would take their place.

The first time it happened, Daredevil was well aware of the Shift. The mafia factions grumbled amongst themselves about a new player, someone with all of Fisk’s secrecy and none of his ideology. Guns moved. Drugs moved. People moved. They changed direction, and changed all the time, and now Daredevil could not be sure he would find a distributor if he looked, if there was a warehouse where hired hands manufactured, packaged and inventoried contraband. A circuitous web search and more than a few questions directed to the right people ascertained that money was still coming in to Hell’s Kitchen, still filling the substitute Fisk’s coffers, but the illegal activity seemed to have moved away after a dramatic decrease.

The first time it happened, Daredevil was investigating a rent controlled apartment complex, not because the landlord was trying to oust its inhabitants, but because he couldn’t oust its inhabitants anymore. The landlord, a bully and a liar by the name of Darrel Feige, had had several of his tenants walking into the office of Nelson and Murdock, complaining about the way Feige seemed to mysteriously lose records concerning rent payments, how the amenities in the building would go on the fritz and the promise of repair was always delayed another week, how pests and invasive molds infected the entire building. Feige, of course, took an extended vacation as soon as a pair of lawyers started sniffing around his building. That did not concern Matt Murdock. That was actually pretty normal.

What concerned Matt Murdock and compelled him to put on the suit, was that Feige went on vacation, and suddenly new management took over his building. In the midst of exterminators clearing out the roaches, repairmen coaxing the washers and driers to life, electricians eliminating the persistent buzz and flicker of the hall lighting, Matt and Foggy decided that Feige, wherever he was, must have been alarmed by the interest of lawyers and, faced with a slam dunk class action lawsuit against him, hired someone to make the building actually inhabitable. That did not concern Matt Murdock. That was actually pretty normal.

The first time it happened, Matt Murdock was concerned because after the repairs were made, Feige did not resurface. He did not return home after a nice long vacation somewhere sunny. He did not send threatening emails to the lawyers who dared frighten him to action. He did not make so much as a peep. In fact, he seemed to have fallen off the face of the earth entirely. And that worried Matt, because the Shift after Fisk set his teeth on edge and made his radar much more sensitive than he liked; he picked up on things he never would have cared about otherwise. When his digging turned up nothing, Daredevil faced the reality: Feige was gone—perhaps dead, perhaps in hiding—but Feige was gone, and whoever could make a man like Feige disappear without a trace like that was bad news.

The first time it happened, Daredevil, in full horned regalia, launched himself from rooftop to rooftop, following the clanking chug-chug of an elderly Buick, its passengers no doubt full of answers. The car slowed and turned down into one of the many narrow alleys of the Kitchen, idled for a long minute and then shut off. Daredevil perched on the edge of a rooftop, out of sight, and waited. One of the windows on the car, an old-timey roll-down, lowered with a squeak, only about two inches, but plenty enough for him to hear the calm drawl inside the car.

“If you want to talk, then come down here and talk.”

For a moment he waited, confused, able to make out the presence of one driver and one passenger and no one else in the alley. He sucked in a breath. The passenger was talking to him, using a conversational voice, certainly not loud enough for a normal person at this range, but plenty loud enough for the Devil of Hell’s Kitchen. Which meant that this man, whoever he was, knew that Daredevil was not like other people.

He clambered down the side of the building and walked up to the Buick about as obliquely as possible, ears straining to pick up the telltale click of a safety switching off, the scrape of a blade leaving a hilt, anything. The passenger seemed just as wary, never leaving the comfort of the car, not unlocking the door, not daring to roll his window any further down. Daredevil could feel his eyes on him from the way his skin prickled.

“Who are you?”

“I am one of many,” the passenger told him, using the same conversational tone, though his listener maintained a good several feet of distance between them. “Like you, I value my anonymity, but you may call me Calvin.”

The car smelled like exhaust and asphalt streets and tired leather, the man inside giving off the silk-and-wool smell of an expensive suit, a pinch of sticky hair product, stale cigarette smoke (a smoker with a single cigarette a day limit, he guessed), a brush of a woman’s perfume, as if he had hugged someone wearing it earlier in the day. “Calvin” wore a watch, expensive, heavy on his left wrist (a right-handed man, then). It ticked steadily. “Who do you work for, Calvin?”

“My employer loves anonymity even more than you or me.” He could hear the smirk in the man’s voice, a rueful thing. His heart ticked in time with his watch, even and steady. “He does not give his name to anyone as far as I can tell. We just call him the Kingpin. Not much of a name, I know. We called Fisk Kingpin, too, and Rigoletto before him. But if you want to investigate him, ‘Kingpin’ is all I can offer you.”

“You’re more forthcoming with information than I usually… encounter.”

Calvin chuckled. “I enjoy having all my teeth in my head, and my kneecaps whole, thank you. Things are changing, Daredevil—may I call you Daredevil? This city is changing, maybe for the better, maybe not, I couldn’t say.” He shifted against the leather upholstery, pressed his palms together. “My employer wished to give you a message. Would you like to hear it?” He continued without waiting for an answer. “He wants you to quit investigating him. He asks that you put away the suit, go back to doing whatever it is you do during the day. He wants you to quit.”

“Not going to happen.”

“He knew you would say that. His people, well, our people, will be watching. Take care, Daredevil.”

The driver moved to put the key back in the ignition. “Before you go, I have one more question.” The driver did not turn the key.

“Ask away.”

“What do you know about me?”

Calvin sat in silence for a long moment. His heart stuttered and then settled back into its steady rhythm. “Hearsay and rumor, mostly. I keep track of the news and my employer asked I do my research before I spoke to you. You operate in Hell’s Kitchen, you wear a red suit (an upgrade from your black outfit), you go by Daredevil. Those are the facts. The speculation blogs about you, though, is where it gets interesting. My favorite referred to you exclusively as Red Batman. I took the liberty of interviewing some of your victims. More than a few claimed you could somehow tell when they were lying, and several claimed you told them you liked hurting them.” Calvin shrugged. “Maybe you’re a psychopath, but you also run around with horns on your head, so. All the people I interviewed said you moved and fought like someone trained you, you could operate perfectly well in near total darkness, you predicted dangers before they came to pass.”

“And what do you think?” he demanded, because all the evidence pointed to a blind man leaping rooftops and bringing his fists to gunfights, but so far everyone from the news to Karen herself had explained the evidence away, unable or unwilling to accept the improbable truth.

Calvin levelled him with a look. “I think you are one scary fucker, Daredevil. Please reconsider my employer’s advice about retiring from your life of vigilantism and have a good night.”

The Buick’s engine turned over and by the time the driver threw it into reverse, Daredevil was three rooftops over and still running.

 

The second time it happened, he probably should not have been out and about at all, let alone in his suit chasing a petty thief. His ribs throbbed while he vaulted over a chain link fence but he paid them no mind, even knowing he would have to hear Claire’s complaints in the bleak early morning light. He nearly had the guy when something—not a bullet—arced through the air and he hit the ground with a stifled curse. Daredevil stumbled to a halt, ears straining, and caught the patter of a heart beating fast several rooftops over, high up, easy to miss when he was focused on the chase. And then a not-bullet hit him in the ass from a completely different direction.

It stung and there would be a bruise there in the morning. He leapt to his feet, ready to get the hell out of dodge when something sharp and cold, a dart, sank into his neck. “Oh, come on,” he hissed, and his skin went numb, his balance spun out, the sounds around him turned in on themselves, fizzed out.

 

Calvin waited for him to wake up. He still smelled of crisp silk-and-wool, cigarette smoke from earlier, just a hint of a woman’s perfume, a pinch of sticky hair product, and the ever present ticking of his heavy, expensive watch on his left wrist. Daredevil did not move, but let the after effects of the drug wear off, his senses creeping out to explore the room. Concrete floor, he registered sluggishly. The air buffeted cool against his mouth—a warehouse where all the windows had been boarded up except two, creating a cross breeze. Still nighttime, he decided, tasting the air surreptitiously. He was secured hand and foot to a bed, but no one had removed his mask, and he could not detect a hint of tampering. No one had even peeked at his face.

The bed felt sturdy enough under him, but he did not dare test it. His restraints, cool metal around his wrists and ankles, told him that whoever Calvin’s employer was, they were not kidding around with duct tape, zip ties, or clothesline. They sprang for police issue handcuffs, probably taking advantage of the cops previously employed by Fisk. But the devil’s in the details, and the details troubled him more and more as the effects of the sedative receded.

He lay on his back on silk sheets. Not cotton sheets. Silk. They smelled freshly laundered, not like warehouse, washed with unscented detergent and fabric softener, the expensive stuff, and line dried. Daredevil chewed that over for a long moment and repressed the panic that threatened to overwhelm him. Because whoever had laundered these sheets used his brand of detergent, and paid the extra cash for the unscented stuff that did not irritate his nose. Which meant that whoever was in charge either knew he had a sensitive nose, knew what brand he preferred, or both.

He breathed and let his senses extend outward. Calvin was the only one in the room, a wide open space on the second floor of the building. Below them, Daredevil could make out three people, sentries, guarding the abandoned warehouse’s entrances. Calvin moved away from the wall where he had been leaning and strolled to the bed, all unhurried movements and rolling gait. He stopped several feet from the bed, hands clasped behind him in some kind of parade rest. “Are you awake, sir?”

Daredevil considered his options, but sitting motionless hardly offered any prospects of escape, so he answered. “Where am I?”

“One of my employer’s safe houses. He reclaimed it from Madame Gao’s empire and it has been rebuilt, more or less, after your, ah, involvement. You’ll be glad to know that the thief you chased is now in police custody. We have left you your mask, but I took the liberty of examining the rest of you. Are you aware you have fractured ribs?”

“Hairline fractures.”

“No, fracture-fractures. They might have been hairline fractures yesterday, but vigilante-ing has done you no favors. I take it you are not taking my employer’s advice?”

He grit his teeth. “No.”

Calvin shuffled for a moment, and pulled something out of his pocket. A pen clicked and he began to scribble. “I don’t know who to make this out to,” he admitted, “so I’ll leave that part blank.”

Daredevil blinked. “Excuse me?”

“Let’s see, today’s date,” Calvin muttered. Ballpoint scraped across thin paper. “How many zeros would you like?”

“Zeros?”

“Yes. I’m bribing you with a check. How many zeros?”

“No checks,” he growled. “I can’t be bought, and I’m not going to stop doing what I do.”

“You know, you can put whoever you want on this. It can go into anyone’s bank account.”

For a moment, Matt imagined himself clumsily scribbling Karen or Foggy’s name on the check and then trying to give it to a teller with a straight face. “No!” he snapped. “You can’t bribe me. I’m not going to stop.” He waited for Calvin to threaten him, or to take advantage of his helpless position and start removing his fingernails or putting pressure on his cracked ribs, or even take off his mask and start threatening the people in his life he cared about.

Calvin made a disgruntled noise in the back of his throat, signed his name to the check, tore it out of the book and slid the slip of paper under one of the many straps of his outfit. “I’ll let my employer know about your reticence. In the meantime, consider this a gift of sorts, a gesture of goodwill. Buy yourself a health insurance policy, or a new television, or just give it to an orphanage. We’ll be in touch.” On that note Calvin strolled out of the room, down the stairs, and out of the warehouse with his three sentries trailing in his wake, and Daredevil was alone.

He lay on the bed with its clean silk sheets for maybe an hour and a half before Claire found him there. She received a text from an unknown number earlier in the night, saying the Daredevil was at that address, on the second floor of the warehouse.  “At least no one put you in a dumpster,” she grumbled.

“Can you get me off this bed?” he asked, more a demand than a request, but something in his breathing tipped her off.

“I found a key on one of the counters downstairs,” she replied, but made no move to insert key into handcuff. She instead opened the side of his outfit and looked down at the sorry state of his torso. “Matt!” she hissed. “These are _broken_!”

He squirmed under her gaze. “I should really be getting home,” he hedged. “You should let me up?”

“When else am I going to get an opportunity like this?” And she set about feeling for damage and pushed a local anesthetic into him while he could not move, before she undid the handcuffs at his wrists so she could begin binding his ribs.

Foggy was completely insufferable the next day. The following week he all but sat on Matt to keep him from doing anything more strenuous than running his fingertips over braille, going so far as to stay at his apartment and hide his Daredevil gear. “You can have it all back when you can take a deep breath without making that face.”

“Foggy!”

“Yeah, that one! Sit down and review these cases for me.”

 

Despite the anguished faces Matt made whenever Foggy looked at him, he missed having him as a roommate, and something in the cockles of his heart settled knowing the man was near. It wasn’t just that Foggy could cook and did cook, and he plied Matt with plates heaped with his cooking every chance he could get. And it wasn’t just that Foggy was good company, and narrated the movies they watched (Matt listened more than watched). And it wasn’t just that Foggy was a walking talking sensory overload that unerringly drew Matt’s attention from the mayhem of the apartments around his to whatever it was they were doing in the sanctum of his home. No, Foggy felt like sanity in an insane world, like a buoy in a storm. And it wasn’t necessarily in the things he did, it was more about what he was.

Matt did not like getting close to other people. He had plenty of acquaintances growing up and in college, but his roommate Foggy was the only one to stick around, and only because Foggy fought for it. Foggy had views about his roommate, and opinions about the world. He made it a habit to walk Matt to his classes and, okay, that was annoying for about two days, but then Foggy would narrate the world to him and…it was…nice?

And Foggy started watching TV shows with Matt and would drag him to movies and, while not really his cup of tea, it was nice going out to places and leaning into Foggy while he explained what was going on onscreen. And what started as helping the blind guy make it to class and became help the blind guy know what The Incredibles is about, became let’s see how many campus functions I can drag Matt to before he puts his foot down, and it turned out to be quite a few. Best of all, Foggy never gave off the pity vibe Matt got from so many sighted people. Mostly, Foggy was there, and that turned out to be about 80% of a friendship.

Matt dated a little in college, and Foggy dated a little, and there was some playful banter that went on between them, some casual matchmaking, some awkward double dates. Matt never stayed with anyone longer than a handful of dates, he didn’t like getting too close to people, and Foggy found he preferred pining to rejection. Which was something that never ceased to strike Matt as bizarre. Not the pining thing, but the fact that girls, and people in general, seemed to skip over him somehow. Foggy, Matt’s personal walking talking sensory overload, could be ignored by multitudes of people at a time (probably why he exuded pure Foggyness at any given moment). The man was solid; there was weight to his every footstep, he was flesh and bones and blood taking up space, breathing air, living, and somehow people overlooked him.

Matt didn’t like getting close to people, but Foggy was likeable. He was funny, and often unnoticed, so he made himself louder than the background noise of Matt’s life. He was kind, or at least kinder than others; he never grabbed Matt, never made him feel helpless or disadvantaged, and always cooked for two. He made sure Matt’s outfits made sense before sending him out into the world (“You’re not wearing anything with green pinstripes, Murdock. Green pinstripes are for couches.”) and he refrained from wearing colognes. Foggy disparaged his own appearance, but Matt never found an ugly trait on his friend, who was kind and loyal and funny and smart, mostly inoffensive to smell and listen to, a solid bulk at his side.

Whatever Matt might say about not wanting to impose, he wanted Foggy there again, liked having his presence in his home. “Just be glad you can’t see the animation in this one, Matty. It’ll give me nightmares for days.” Matt grinned to himself and settled back, the arm of his couch on one side and Foggy on his other, and let himself heal.

 

The first time Matt and Foggy kissed, they were piss drunk after a hellacious round of midterms, sitting on Matt’s bed, the radio playing softly in the corner, people down the hall being annoying and loud, Foggy’s face cradled between Matt’s palms and Foggy’s fingers in Matt’s hair. Their lips brushed, tentative, sweet, almost but not quite chaste. They parted, and Matt was giggling, giddy from the booze and damn if it wasn’t contagious and Foggy was laughing too, and Matt ran his hands lightly, always lightly, over Foggy’s features. “I want to know what you look like,” he said, suddenly very earnest despite the grin still curling his lips. They didn’t talk about it the next day, because Foggy tricked himself into believing it was weird and Matt…

Matt didn’t like getting close to people.

 

“Forget falling down an open manhole. One of these days you’re going to go out and not come back at all.”

Matt did not miss the sting in Foggy’s voice, the edge of disappointment, and sadness so thick he could choke on it. Matt shifted at the table, stirring his Cheerios around the bowl, painfully aware that he was wearing only pajamas and that Foggy sat across from him, being miserable.

“I’m just going back to work today.”

“Yeah, today. But tonight you’re going to go out and be Daredevil. Or tomorrow night. Or the night after.”

He forced a spoonful of cereal between his lips, even though he didn’t much feel like eating just then. “Someone has to. Someone has to act when the law can’t.”

Foggy watched him for a long moment. “Just come back to me, buddy.”

“I will. You know I will.” He made himself smile. “Murdocks, we get knocked down a lot, but we always get back up again.”

 

The first time Matt and Foggy fucked, they were in college, the dorms throughout campus already half empty on day three of exam week, neither of them drunk, neither of them ready to celebrate anything. What Foggy would never tell his best friend was that he was terrified that night, terrified of losing him, terrified that Matt would become distant and drift away, become the proverbial “someone I used to know.” What Matt would not tell Foggy, not until much later, was that he could hear the thunder of his best friend’s frightened heart, and he wondered how Foggy’s eyes would look fully dilated, that he could feel the hot flush in his cheeks, his neck, down his chest.

Foggy wrapped a hand around his best friend’s cock and stroked. Matt fumbled for a moment before getting Foggy’s pants undone and then had his cock, hot and solid, against his palm, under his fingers. Matt lay mostly under Foggy, the latter propped on his side and curled around him on the narrow dorm bed. Matt heard him draw breath and settled a little deeper against his pillow, with a warm Foggy at his side, blanketing him with the scent of inoffensive shampoo, deodorant, the smell peculiar to college textbook paper and sex. And then Foggy started narrating, using the low, steady, almost confidential tone he used in public spaces when he wasn’t making a spectacle of the blind guy, and Matt came with a rush and he didn’t see stars behind his eyes but he felt entire supernovae crackle along his spine and collapse under his skin and that was better than he could have imagined. Foggy came soon after with a bitten curse and choked moan he smothered against Matt’s shoulder and for a few minutes they simply lay there, on that too small bed, and they breathed.

It wasn’t the kind of thing friends do. Given half a chance, Matt might have let himself drift away, or run away. He would have let Foggy slip out of his life, let Foggy return to his family and Matt, the orphan, the loner, would have been fine by that arrangement. But Foggy never gave him that chance, and all that summer Matt found himself going to family outings, to strange restaurants, to volunteer opportunities, to movies he couldn’t see but gave him an excuse to sink against Foggy’s familiar warmth and keep one ear on the actors’ voices and one ear on Foggy’s rumbling murmur. Matt didn’t like getting close to people, and he didn’t allow himself the luxury of Foggy’s bed again, but he could never fully extricate himself from Foggy’s life, from his friendship. He followed Foggy to Landman and Zach, but made a point to find and rent his own apartment. He said he needed his own space and, affable as always, Foggy swallowed the lie, hook, line and sinker.

 

When Daredevil got captured by the remainder of the Russian mob, Nikolay Volkov, the big man in charge so far as he could tell, told his men not to execute him in the street. “Bring him underground; there are eyes and ears everywhere,” Volkov told them, his voice cold, inflectionless, and completely void of an accent, Russian, New York or otherwise. Daredevil, beaten, could not resist when they zip tied his wrists and ankles and put a burlap sack over his head (the breath and sweat and fear of the last man to wear it clung to the rough fabric, and Matt refused to let himself think about that in any kind of depth).

They rode in a van for a ways, long enough for Daredevil to blot out the worst of the ringing in his ears and take a few steadying breaths. His ribs weren’t broken, so that was a plus, but he suspected he would not live long enough to really enjoy the fact. Everything hurt, skin and muscle blazing at him unpleasantly, but nothing was broken. If he lived, he would be swollen and bruised, and he would need to tend the shallow cut on his left forearm, but that was only if he lived. He chewed his lip as a new thought occurred to him. Foggy was going to be _so pissed_.

The van came to a stop not far from where they had beaten him down, and two men bodily dragged him out of the van and into what sounded like a parking garage. They descended downward. He breathed. There was Volkov, who sounded stocky and young and terribly unimpressed, and besides him there were six others, two of whom were limping and one seemed to have a hard time breathing. The others were hale and hearty, though, enough to restrain an obstinate Daredevil, drag him to the lowest level of the garage, no doubt to the darkest, loneliest corner in all of Hell’s Kitchen, push him to his knees (he was not proud of the strangled scream he choked out when his battered knees hit the hard concrete). Volkov turned the safety off, and was smart enough to stand safely out of lunging distance, his feet parted to take the recoil from his gun.

“Do you have any last words?”

He spat in the closest approximation of Volkov’s face he could manage (and missed by about two feet). “I’ll see you in Hell.”

“You are bad for business,” he gritted out, no doubt taking aim for the execution shot. “Make peace with your god.”

But someone was speed walking down to meet them, expensive shoes across concrete. “Excuse me!” a man called, and from his place on the ground Daredevil could make out the uneasy ripple in the Russian mobsters, the way Volkov ground his teeth and shifted to aim his gun at the new arrival, one of the more pragmatic henchmen bringing his foot down hard on Daredevil’s back to keep him pinned to the floor, the ticking of an expensive watch, heavy, wrapped around someone’s left wrist.

“You have got to be kidding me,” Volkov muttered, and Daredevil almost laughed because he was just thinking the same thing. “Walk away, this does not concern you.”

“Excuse me, sir,” Calvin repeated, untroubled by the gun pointing at him. “But you are about to make a terrible investment. The man you are about to execute is a prized asset of my employer’s and he would rather you not spray his brains all over the ground.”

“I. Don’t. Care.”

“How many zeros?”

“ _What?_ ”

Calvin reached into his breast pocket and took out a check book with a flourish. A ballpoint pen clicked. “I don’t know who to make this out to,” he admitted, sounding apologetic.

“I don’t want your money. Forget it. Stand next to your asset; makes the blood easier to hose out.”

Calvin sighed as if he were asked to give up his bus seat to an able-bodied individual. He closed his checkbook with a snap and tucked it back into his pocket, and _then he sidled up next to Matt, dropping to his knees_. “Get out of here,” Daredevil hissed through the side of his mouth, even while his gangster removed his shoe from his back and he could shift into a more upright position.

“I have a last request.”

“For fuck’s sake, what?” Volkov snarled.

“I want a last smoke, before I go. Terrible habit, this seems like the only way to quit.”

Volkov ground his teeth, but the honor bound to last requests seemed to supersede his need for expediency. “Fine, be quick about it.”

Daredevil hoped Calvin would retrieve a gun or a Taser from his coat pocket, but out came an actual pack of cigarettes (menthol) and a lighter (old-timey, maybe a Zippo, the kind that can flick open and flip shut with the right wrist movement). A cigarette went between his lips, the flint on his lighter clicked and flared, and what happened next was a blur.

These are the events that Calvin and Matt were able to cobble together after the fact: Calvin lit his cigarette and threw his lighter into one of the ceiling lights overhead. The light, an elderly buzzy thing, shattered spectacularly. Sparks rained down on them. Calvin and Matt scattered in time for guns to fire. Matt felt a shift in the air from the moment he moved to when gunfire blasted through his hearing; someone had cut the power to the garage, throwing them into total darkness. Naturally, this last did not impress Daredevil, who, upon sensing some confusion in the Russians, hooked a hand around Calvin’s elbow and marched him out of the garage, aiming a few well-placed punches and kicks at the errant mobsters who came too close to them. Once back on ground level, hand still on his elbow, Calvin pulled Daredevil into a mad sprint and then they were making for the rooftops, making for the night sky, making for freedom.

“When someone gives you an out, you take it!” he snarled through gritted teeth.

Calvin laughed, actually laughed. “He would shoot me in the back.” They paused some blocks away from the parking garage to catch their breath. Calvin pulled out his smokes again and a cheap, plastic lighter and shook the pack at Daredevil, who declined. He lit the cigarette, breathing in the smoke deeply and slowly, like a lifeline.

“Who are you, Calvin?” Daredevil asked at last. “Most people don’t run in to stop executions, and they certainly don’t run across rooftops, and the kind of people who do don’t smoke Capri menthols.”

He puffed, heart rate settling down close to baseline. “I’m just the man hired to try to keep you from doing what you do.”

“Then why halt the execution?”

Calvin chuckled. “I don’t disagree with what you do, Daredevil. Honestly, I would applaud it given half the chance. You intervene where the police don’t dare, and I think that’s something Hell’s Kitchen needs.” He took a long drag off his cigarette. “Do you need medical attention, sir?”

“I’ll be fine, just battered and scraped up.”

“Have you given any more thought about retiring?” he wheedled. “Especially given the events of tonight?”

Daredevil shook his head. “Sorry, never going to happen.”

“A pity,” Calvin sighed. “Have a good evening, Daredevil.”

“Yeah. You too.”

 

This is what people see when they researched Nelson and Murdock (Attorneys at Law): The two lawyers graduated from Columbia, but mostly they see that Foggy graduated cum laude and Matt summa cum laude, and people will tend to jump to conclusions. They will think that the blind attorney had a great deal of help, that he had tutors, that his teachers took pity on his poor sightless soul and bumped up his GPA. People will think that Foggy, a man prone to descriptions like “thick” and “homely,” cleaved to Matt’s endlessly forgiving side, that while he was smart he wasn’t quite summa cum laude smart, that on top of being thick and homely, he was slow on the uptake.

Of course, people see a white cane and make all kinds of assumptions. They see a cardboard sign written in sharpie and presume that the law firm behind it lacks in more than just clientele.

Matt was well into his second semester rooming with Foggy Nelson when it occurred to him that he had made an assumption. “Do you…do you ever study?”

The sound of an online game—World of Warcraft, maybe—was dialed down dramatically, but the mouse continued to click a nervous tattoo against his opponents. “Um, some?” Foggy hedged, abruptly uncomfortable. “I mean, I go over my Punjabi flashcards most every day and I do the readings.”

Matt remembered his nightly visits to the library, hours spent running his fingertips over braille, the drone of lectures playing on repeat in his ear whenever he needed to take a bus or a shuttle. And whenever he returned, Foggy regaled him with a new story. “So I was in the cafeteria earlier when…” “So I was talking to Carmen in the library when…” “So I was buying some Poptarts at the 7/11 and you wouldn’t believe…”

Matt Murdock considered himself a pretty smart cookie, but he had been taken in by the sensory overload that is Foggy Nelson, had been fooled by the picture his roommate and (best) friend cobbled together for the outside world. He took for granted that Foggy was loud, a little obnoxious, funny, disparaged his appearance, was often overlooked, was partial to Doritos and online games, had a weakness for pretty girls, but not once did Matt ever come across evidence that Foggy was dumb. Lax with his studies, maybe, but a little prying revealed that Foggy pulled in the same kind of test grades Matt did with about half of the effort, and didn’t worry over his papers like he should. It was infuriating.

The mouse clicked. “I was thinking, since we’re going to have some of the same classes next year, we could go halvesies on the textbooks.”

Matt shook himself from his reverie. “Uh, I can’t read print,” he pointed out.

“Yeah, I know.”

“What, so you’re just going to pick up braille to save some money?”

Foggy didn’t turn away from his computer, but his heart stuttered in his chest and he squirmed in his chair. “I might have picked it up already. You know. Whatever. I have a lot of free time between classes and it seems like an important…Are you mad?” He abandoned his game to twist around and look up at Matt, who probably looked about ready to swallow his tongue.

“Um.”

“Forget it; probably makes more sense to get separate books anyway. Forget I said anything.”

The next year, they shared the textbooks for the classes they had together and took turns reading from them some nights, and read aloud to each other some nights, and they studied together—rather, Foggy quizzed Matt until they both had the material nearly memorized. They fell into a familiar pattern, and school became like their friendship: natural as breathing and twice as easy.

 

The night before, Matt in full Daredevil regalia went on patrol through sleet and rain and a temperature plunge that had him laid out in bed late the next morning. He fumbled for his phone. “Foggy,” he whined into the receiver.

“Oh my God, are you okay?” his business partner hissed. “Don’t tell me you actually fell through an open manhole.”

Matt emitted a whiny noise. “I’m siiiiiiick.”

Foggy chewed that over for a long moment. “Are you calling in sick to work?”

“Yes. You can read my briefs, right?”

“Yeah, I can read your briefs,” he sighed. “You sound awful. I’m going to swing by on my way home tonight and get some soup in you.”

“You’re the best.”

“Uh-huh. You dial Hottie McBurner Phone if you actually feel like dying, okay?”

“Okay. Bye.”

As good as his word, Foggy showed up about the time they would normally close up shop, armed with a bottle of Nyquil, an industrial sized package of cough drops, a veritable bucket of chicken noodle soup from the deli down the street and an air of determination. Matt tried to dampen the shivers wracking his frame, but Foggy was watching for them specifically. “You are running a fever,” he growled.

“Probably,” Matt allowed. An hour later a bowl of soup weighed pleasantly against his stomach, Foggy wrapped him in two blankets, and he chewed drowsily on a lemon flavored cough drop, the tang of Nyquil still thick in the back of his throat.

“So do you still have super senses when you’re sick?” Foggy asked from the armchair across from the couch.

He let his eyes fall open. “Can’t smell, and everything tastes funny.” He sniffled for emphasis. “Everything sounds like I’m underwater, because of my sinuses. And I can’t see at all.”

“You can’t see anyway.”

“Mm.”

“No more Daredevilling for you, not for the rest of the week.”

“’Kay.”

At some point in the night, Foggy must have guided Matt, still safely burritoed within two blankets, to his bed and tucked him in. He awoke on silk sheets that still smelled of Foggy, and some kind of cheesy eggy casserole monstrosity drying slowly in the oven. He ate every bite and then went back to bed to sleep for another few hours.

The next day he felt almost like himself and went to work, as he was wont to do, and despite Foggy’s stern warning to stay in that night, he might have slipped into his Daredevil outfit after dark. He did not have anything in mind—the new Kingpin was hard to track down, especially since he (or she, he amended) did not seem especially keen on blaring criminal activity. So Daredevil patrolled his city, creeping through the warehouse district with an ear cocked toward the docks when the familiar wisp of cigarette smoke tugged at his attention. “You look like shit,” Calvin pronounced around the butt of a cigarette.

“I’m wearing a cowl, how can you even tell?”

“I can tell,” Calvin replied. “And I have my orders.”

Maybe it was Calvin’s quickness, or the fact that Daredevil was still recovering from being sick, or he was just unlucky, but a dart heavy with some kind of sedative landed in the soft flesh under his jaw. “You fucker,” he grumbled even while he fell to the pavement, the world around him fizzing out.

 

He came to an indeterminate amount of time later with a sense of dejavu. He lay on his back on silk sheets washed with unscented detergent recently enough to be free of the otherwise pervasive abandoned warehouse smell, his wrists and ankles bound by metal handcuffs to a sturdy bed. After a few minutes to let his head clear he detected three heartbeats on the ground floor, and the familiar presence of Calvin leaning against the wall on this floor.

He sucked in a deep breath and let loose a bloodcurdling scream that sent four heartbeats ratcheting straight into the danger zone and he thrashed in his bindings, rattled the handcuffs, yanked hard enough to leave thin bruises along his wrists and ankles. The bed frame creaked under the onslaught, but remained solid beneath him. He screamed and thrashed and writhed until he ran out of breath and lay there, limp. Calvin approached him slowly and stopped a safe several feet from the bed. “Are you done?” he asked. Daredevil bared his teeth at him, and the man probably made some kind of facial expression he could not decipher. “Do you feel better?”

“Let. Me. Go.”

“Mm. No. I generally disapprove of holding men against their will, but I’m not being paid to be nice.”

Daredevil’s nostrils flared, but he tamped down on the mulish scowl that threatened to break the surface. “Who do you work for?”

“He goes by the name of Kingpin. We’ve been over this.”

“Are you with SHIELD?”

His heart stuttered, giving him away, but he answered with “If I were with SHIELD, you wouldn’t still have a mask on, and your name and address would be written down in a neat little file somewhere.”

Daredevil steeled himself. “Does that make Fury the Kingpin?”

His heart stayed steady. “He better not be. I think Hell’s Kitchen has seen enough big bald bastards running the show to last a lifetime.”

He left after that, and Claire did not come for him until the early hours of the morning, shortly before her shift. Calvin left her the key to Matt’s handcuffs and, in a strangely kind gesture, cab fare. She approved loudly, and told Daredevil to keep the key on his person, “You know, for the next time they nab you and you can just save me a trip.”

Matt spent the next several days wary and tense. He did not know who this Kingpin was, or what he (or she) wanted, or what they knew about him. He suspected they knew where he lived, and at least some of what he could do. Beyond that, he was proverbially blind.

 

Daredevil picked his way through the streets, keeping clear of the buzz of streetlamps and noisier intersections. He didn’t want to be seen.

Muggers and drug dealers, a universal reality, seemed to be the only criminals left in this side of town. The muggers never knew anything—they were just desperate lowlifes trying to make up rent or debt money by terrorizing pedestrians. And the drug dealers weren’t any better; four out of five knew nothing, and the fifth only regurgitated the same old song. There was a Kingpin benefitting from the drug trade, or what was left of it, and no one could pick him (or her) out of a lineup.

The impact of a beanbag fired from the handgun equivalent of a cannon sent Daredevil reeling in an abandoned alley, muffling curses the whole way. He righted himself and picked out the shuffling scurry of his attacker, heart beating fast and nervous, and only a shift in the breeze told him the person was unwashed, smelling of the gutter, the street, like Hell’s Kitchen on a hot day. Homeless, Daredevil realized, and hardly felt the sting of a tranquilizer dart sinking into the side of his neck. The Kingpin was paying the homeless to watch for him and take him down. He barely had time to feel indignant before he sank wearily onto the asphalt and his senses fled him.

This time when Daredevil awoke, he was laying on his front against the increasingly familiar unscented silk sheets, wrists and ankles restrained, Calvin’s unflappable presence somehow seeping solicitous through the fog over his senses. The man plodded across the room and stopped a safe three yards or so from the bed, arms crossed. There was no cigarette smoke about his person, as if his pack ran empty some days previous and he had yet to purchase a new one.

“I want to let you know that you make my life unreasonably difficult.”

Daredevil grit his teeth. “Right back at ya.”

His phone buzzed. Calvin retrieved it from his breast pocket and hit a button, evidently read a text message, and hummed in the back of his throat before putting his phone away. “The Kingpin wants to speak with you in person. Do be on your best behavior—everyone I know has been dying to get a look at him, and he’s going to meet you. Granted, you won’t necessarily get a good look per se, but I think it’s the thought that counts. Have a good evening, Daredevil.” Calvin strolled away, and Daredevil counted his footsteps until he turned a corner and climbed down the stairs.

Quiet descended on him, or at least the quiet that comes from a mostly empty warehouse. Nothing was ever truly quiet for Daredevil. He breathed as evenly as he could and tried to squirm out of his handcuffs, which had exactly as much give as his previous encounters (none) and felt the extent of his vigilantism on his body. Some cuts and bruises, nothing major, but they ached down his ribs, his back, his ass cheek where one of those stupid nonlethal beanbags pelted him. He waited on that stupid bed for at least twenty minutes, listening to the sleeping docks and the warehouse district, car alarms, the scream of damp brakes being engaged, a siren, two, three.

And then a different sound filtered into his horizon. Footsteps, solid and sure, and breathing, and a heartbeat, and all together they formed the picture of a man Matt Murdock knew better than any other living soul. He sucked in a breath and waited until the footsteps drew near enough for him to hear. “Foggy, you have to get out! You have to leave now, it’s not safe!” His breathing hitched just a little, and his heart stuttered, but his footsteps only increased in urgency.

“Matt,” it came out a sigh, a wistful sound, and then Foggy sidled up to the bed and brushed his palm of Daredevil’s stubbled cheek.

“Foggy, you need to go. Now! Someone is coming for me and I need you somewhere safe.”

“I didn’t know how to tell you; God knows I wanted to tell you so many times.”

“What?”

Foggy’s hand drifted over the back of his neck, down his spine, and rested, hot and heavy, in the small of his back. “Kingpin isn’t going to be a big problem for you.” His heart raced, but he kept is breathing deep and even. “Do you remember that day I found you in the mask? Covered in blood, mostly dead, I had to call Claire to get you put back together again?”

“I remember.”

“Okay.” Foggy steeled himself for a moment. “I remember it too, but in amazing Technicolor, and I felt so betrayed. It broke my heart, Murdock. No, I’m not done yet. It broke my heart, and I didn’t know if I could ever trust you again. I’m still kinda feeling my way along.

“And it occurred to me more than a few times how completely bizarre you are. You’re blind, like, straight up blind, and you go out doing acrobatics and parkour and you hit people in the face. So weird. So I started taking some first aid and CPR classes after office hours, and then I got into a self-defense class, because if things start going sideways I want to hold my own, you know? And all I could think about was that I was doing this for my vigilante best friend, who gets confused when I rearrange my furniture.

“And things started to get stirred up when Fisk got put away. He had an entire criminal empire going and then he left and someone was going to pick up where he left off, and I thought: Why not me? Don’t get mad, Matt. You have no right to get mad.”

“I’m not mad.” That came out more than a little strangled.

“Riiiiiight. So I get this idea into my head that if the Devil of Hell’s Kitchen can be blind, why can’t Foggy Nelson run a crime syndicate, and since said crime syndicate spent about fifty percent of its resources trying to stop Daredevil and I wasn’t exactly opposed to that plan, I ran with it.”

“Who is Calvin?”

“Uh, tall guy? Fancy hair, always wears a suit so sharp it could cut steel, ugly watch?”

“Yeah, him.”

“Don’t know his real name. Ex-SHIELD agent who flew the coop after what happened in New Mexico, from what I’ve been able to pull out of him. I think he put together that you’re blind, but I doubt he’ll say anything. Who would believe him?”

Daredevil, or maybe he was only ever Matt when Foggy was so close, let out a breath he didn’t know he was holding. “You’re why he didn’t kill me.”

“I was very firm on that front. No killing Daredevil.”

“But chaining me to a bed is fair game.”

“I didn’t know how to bring that up during daylight hours.” Matt picked up on the edge of innuendo there. Foggy’s hand rested still on his lower back, friendly and chaste and completely maddening. In the past ten minutes his entire world was turned upside down. Foggy was not a mob boss, he was The Mob Boss, the Kingpin, at best a major security threat and at worst filling his coffers with bloody money. And he was also Matt’s best friend, the only relationship (platonic or otherwise) that lasted the test of time, whose footstep and heartbeat were known to him better than his own. And Foggy had just hinted that he liked the idea of Matt being tied to a bed. His skin felt too hot, pulled tight across his body.

“Fog, you can’t just say something like that.” And what was his hand doing, but rubbing slow circles into his skin? His fingertips dragged across the red leather of the suit, and later Matt would swear he could make out the individual whorls of his fingerprints through his clothing, branded into the flesh of his back even when Foggy applied the barest hint of pressure, the heel of his hand digging into the bunched muscle and sinew there. Matt struggled briefly against his bonds, trying to squirm away from the brand hot touch and arch into that pressure at the same time. Words hissed between his teeth before his brain could catch up to his mouth. “Don’t stop.”

“Should I take you home?” Foggy purred.

Matt, a master orator, the pride of his communications classes at Columbia, emitted something that sounded like “Muh!”

Foggy pressed the heel of his hand about two inches higher up his back and rubbed a small circle there. “Should we stay here for a bit?”

Matt sank into the mattress a little more, felt himself start to go boneless. He didn’t like getting close to people, but getting close to Foggy was like breathing—easy and natural and, he was coming to realize, necessary. How long had it been since he let someone put their hands on him? Claire, he realized, rubbing his stubble against the sheet under his cheek, but the night she stayed at his place had been more about making her feel safe than mutual pleasure, especially considering her injuries. And chained down, he should be freaking out, should be overwhelmed by panic (call it a blind thing, a vigilante thing, maybe even a Murdock thing, but for him being in control is more necessity than luxury) but the sheer familiarity of the bed and the warehouse and Foggy’s presence meant the wave of panic never broke over him.

His cock, trapped in his pants, pressed into the mattress, hardened painfully. All at once Foggy withdrew his hand, taking that warmth and delicious pressure away, and for a split instant a false future played in Matt’s head, wherein Foggy sighs in disgust and walks away and leaves Matt, hard and pathetic, chained to the bed for the police to find. It was a deep seated fear of his, a fear that gripped him tight throughout college and well into their interning days, a fear that very nearly came into fruition the day after Foggy found him mostly dead and still wearing the black cowl. Matt didn’t like getting close to people, because it was so much more efficient to carve his heart out of his chest with a soup spoon than deal with the emotional fallout when they left him (and they always left him) but then Foggy knelt on the floor by Matt’s head. “Tell me what you want,” Foggy ordered, voice pitched low.

Matt blinked mutely at him, brain trying to pick out the many warring wants vying for his voice at that moment. What did he want? He wanted to close the four inches between his nose and Foggy’s hair (washed with a cheap brand shampoo and conditioner, sweet-smelling, air dried, it would be soft under his hand, in need of a trim if the split ends were anything to go by). He wanted to impose himself permanently into Foggy’s life, like an inoperable tumor, live on his couch and return from Daredevil activities, a stray dog returning to a kindly home. He wanted to oust Foggy from this new lifestyle (did the man not know how _dangerous_ it was?) and wrap him in bubble wrap, and he wanted to scold him and be generally dramatic. He wanted to plant his face between Foggy’s thighs and make him squeal. He wanted Foggy to push his fingers inside him and make Matt squeal. He wanted to give him a hard time because crime syndicate overlords should be able to wear better suits. He wanted…

The pad of Foggy’s thumb traced lightly over his bottom lip. “Matt,” he murmured. “You spend every minute of every day taking care of this city. Pro bono cases, writing up wills for little old ladies, wearing horns on your head and beating the tar out of muggers. I think it’s time someone took care of you.”

“Yeah, what’re friends for?” Matt offered, voice weak.

“Okay, I’m going to pretend I didn’t hear that,” Foggy chuckled. His fingers found the back of Matt’s neck and worked the muscles there through the thin fabric of his outfit. “No one is going to disturb us,” he assured, lips nearly pressed to Matt’s ear. “So the horns are coming off, Matthew. Any objections?”

“Nng.”

The cool, natural air current running through the warehouse, fresh air seeping in through cracks around windows and doors, stirred by Foggy shifting where he knelt and their breaths rushing in and out, the air brushed over Matt’s hypersensitive skin, his forehead, his brow, his upper cheeks. Foggy dug his fingers into his damp hair and worked his scalp over, nails digging in occasionally. In what felt like no time at all, Foggy had the rest of his outfit peeled open, pale Irish skin laid bare to his breath, hot and damp and not nearly enough. His fingertips brushed over his back, from his nape to his tailbone, lingering over the various scars left there from previous battles, and Matt shuddered under his ministrations, gooseflesh pebbling his skin.

“I’ll quit being Daredevil,” Matt promised. “And you can quit being the Kingpin.” Foggy’s hand slipped lower, a bit under where his hips pressed into the mattress, _there_. He gasped and made a choked noise that couldn’t even pass for human. “And we’ll just be Nelson and Murdock, Avocadoes at Law,” he babbled.

“You’re not going to quit, Matt,” Foggy murmured into his hair. He sounded sad, but also firm, because the only person who truly knew Matt would know about the devil in him, his quick temper and quicker fists. Stick warned him about people getting close, that they would distract him from his mission, or turn out to be liabilities. And Matt didn’t like getting too close to people, but no amount of Catholic guilt, Stick’s training, or heart break could have prepared him for Foggy Nelson. Matt panted into the silky soft sheet at his cheek and parted his legs. “And I’m never going to stop trying to take care of you,” Foggy promised against his temple. “If that means sitting on top of the criminal infrastructure of Hell’s Kitchen until it screams, then that’s what I’m going to do.” Matt arched into his touch and smothered a sob into the thin mattress. Foggy hummed agreeably in his ear. “You’re stuck with me, buddy,” he promised, and twisted his hand just so and—

“Oh,” Matt gasped, and he shook, panting, the handcuffs rattling impossibly loud in his ears and Foggy’s familiar heartbeat beside him and the cacophony that is Hell’s Kitchen fell dead silent in the wake of a supernova collapsing down his spine, bursting hot and cold under his flesh. His body fell slack into the mattress. “You’re helping me clean this suit,” he tried to growl reproachfully, but it came out soft, awed.

“Later,” Foggy replied. He rumpled Matt’s hair and then the handcuffs clicked open and he pushed himself into a sitting position. “We have to be in court in an hour, Murdock. Lucky for you, I have fresh clothes you can wear waiting in the car.”

**Author's Note:**

> I live for comments and kudos, so don't be afraid to let me know what you think!


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